Thoughts on books, reading and publishing from the staff and friends of the Tattered Cover Book Store.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

"Reyna Grande's extraordinary journey towards the American dream will be an inspiration to anyone who has ever dreamed of a better life.”—Ligiah Villalobos, Writer and Executive Producer of La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon)

Mago pointed to a spot on the dirt floor and reminded me that my umbilical cord was buried there. “That way,” Mami told the midwife, “no matter where life takes her, she won’t ever forget where she came from.”

Then
Mago touched my belly button . . . She said that my umbilical cord was
like a ribbon that connected me to Mami. She said, “It doesn’t matter
that there’s a distance between us now. That cord is there forever.”

When
Reyna Grande’s father leaves his wife and three children behind in a
village in Mexico to make the dangerous trek across the border to the
United States, he promises he will soon return from “El Otro Lado” (The
Other Side) with enough money to build them a dream house where they can
all live together. His promises become harder to believe as months turn
into years. When he summons his wife to join him, Reyna and her
siblings are deposited in the already overburdened household of their
stern, unsmiling grandmother.
The three siblings are forced to
look out for themselves; in childish games they find a way to forget the
pain of abandonment and learn to solve very adult problems. When their
mother at last returns, the reunion sets the stage for a dramatic new
chapter in Reyna’s young life: her own journey to “El Otro Lado” to live
with the man who has haunted her imagination for years, her long-absent
father.

In this extraordinary memoir, award-winning writer Reyna
Grande vividly brings to life her tumultuous early years, capturing all
the confusion and contradictions of childhood, especially one spent
torn between two parents and two countries. Elated when she feels the
glow of her father’s love and approval, Reyna knows that at any moment
he might turn angry or violent. Only in books and music and her rich
imaginary life does she find solace, a momentary refuge from a world in
which every place feels like “El Otro Lado.”

The Distance Between Uscaptures
one girl’s passage from childhood to adolescence and beyond. A funny,
heartbreaking, lyrical story, it reminds us that the joys and sorrows of
childhood are always with us, invisible to the eye but imprinted on the
heart, forever calling out to us of those places we first called home.